Thursday, July 24, 2014

Gun Violence Is A Symptom

More shootings in Chicago. More every week. Last weekend, an 11-year-old was killed by stray bullets*. Some are calling for stricter gun control. Just how you'd get stricter gun control is something of a conundrum as Chicago already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. The only thing I can think of is house-to-house gun confiscation searches done on a regular basis.

And after that, what? Do you think people are shooting each other, but aside from that, they're at home playing backgammon quietly in their homes after a long day of working hard to improve themselves?

I'm not sure what the ratio is, but I'm sure that child abuse rates, for example, are orders of magnitude higher than gun violence rates. Dittos for other crimes. That is, for every person killed by a gun, maybe 23 people are robbed, 37 people are beaten, 81 kids are sexually abused and so forth. If you stop the gun violence, you haven't changed any of those.

Ending gun violence will put a stop to finding bodies lying in pools of blood in the streets. I suppose that after that, we can all go back to watching Big Bang Theory with clean consciences. The people being beaten, robbed and assaulted can take care of themselves.

* - Since this happens nearly every weekend, this post will be forever fresh. Yay.